READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 32:1-20
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
St. Matthew 24:15-28
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 1)
On this antepenultimate Sunday, our Lord speaks directly to
us saying,
“So when you see
the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the
holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to
the mountains.”
Antepenultimate meaning the third last, of course.
Third last Sunday, ever, is where our minds should be. As in after this Sunday,
there will only be two more. If only. If only our Lord would come quickly. Come
quickly, Lord Jesus and tarry not, for we have had more than enough.
More than enough of abominations, which we think we
see day in and day out, yet they never seem to be the right Abomination. The
one that triggers The End. Unfortunate.
But what is this abomination we are to look out for?
We have the joke “Obama-nation”, but that has passed its prime. None of those
over-the-top prophesies came true at all. So that’s not it.
If we start with Genesis, there are two spots that mention
“abomination” and both fall within the Joseph storyline. And both give away
just about everything we need to know about this “abomination”, but in the
reverse, as in Joseph is going to show us what the world, the devil, and our sinful
nature find abominable.
When his brother’s come back for food a second time
during the famine, they were told to bring Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin.
At the sight of him, Joseph was overcome with emotion, it being so long since
they last saw each other. He had to leave the room and weep. Regaining control
over himself, he orders Supper to be set, but he and the Egyptians do not eat
with Joseph’s brothers, because it is an abomination to the Egyptians (Gen
43:32).
This is what the devil thinks is an abomination: eating
supper, breaking bread with God’s Chosen. The second mention of abomination in
Genesis comes in chapter 46, when Joseph tells his brothers what to say in
front of Pharaoh, in order that they may move their lives into Goshen, the
richest of Egyptian land.
Joseph tells them to say that they have kept
livestock, they and their fathers before them, all their lives. For to say that
they are shepherds would be an abomination to Egypt. Genesis 46:34 says, “…for
every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.”
Shepherds and their breaking of the bread are abominations
to the devil and his angels. Shepherds and the breaking of the bread. You got
that, right?
So as we continue through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the
things that are abominations to God have to do with Temple life. The
uncleanness of man, unclean animals, crustaceans (no more crab feasts!),
abominable birds same as mentioned in v. 28 of today’s Gospel, and creepy
crawlies (so much for impossible burgers!).
In Deuteronomy, its adultery, divorce, homosexuality,
perversion of marriage, perversion of male and female, and idols. However, it
is not the things themselves that are abominable, rather it is what they do to
the people: to you. That is, they make you unclean and therefore unable to go
to Church to stand in God’s presence.
As you would expect then, Holy Scripture reveals one more
abomination to sin, death, and the devil, that is Temple worship. Worship of
the one true God is also an abomination, as we hear in Exodus 8:26. There,
Pharaoh does one of his fake “giving in” moments, after the 4th plague: flies.
He tells Moses to hold church within the land of Egypt. Moses, knowing better,
replies: “It would not be right to do so, for the offerings we shall
sacrifice to the Lord our God are an abomination to the Egyptians. If we
sacrifice offerings abominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they
not stone us? We must go three days' journey into the wilderness and sacrifice
to the Lord our God as he tells us” (Ex 8:26-27).
So now we draw closer as we piece all this together and
finally understand the Abomination and its desolation. Part of it has to do
with the Temple and its life lived in faith. Part of it has to do with a
Shepherd and His Supper. Part of it has to do with cleansing and purifying. ANd
as Jesus comes on the scene, He finds that all these abominations have been
neatly gathered in His house by men.
Ezekiel 8:10-12 says, “So I went in [the Temple] and saw.
And there, engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things
and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel. 11 And
before them stood seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel…Each had his
censer in his hand, and the smoke of the cloud of incense went up...they
say, ‘The Lord does not see us, the Lord has forsaken the land.’”
So Jesus cleanses that Temple on Palm Sunday, but only
in a pre-game way. He pulls off the covers and reveals the filth. He bores
holes into the walls and exposes the darkness that sin has put there. I said
pre-game, because it turns out the abominations are inside men, not just walls,
says Zechariah 9:7, they are that which we make for ourselves to worship (Isa
2:20).
Jesus is the rival that shows up. He is not like the
abominations you worship, which you have carved upon your walls and upon your
flesh. He does not look like those things in which you fear, love, and trust.
The Shepherd becomes the abomination, in a world full of abominations.
He proclaims that He will gather His sheep, as the
Good Shepherd, and give them life everlasting. He claims He has a Supper to
give, in order to break the bread of heaven for you that you may be forgiven.
He proclaims that He has a Temple to be destroyed and raised three days later,
to never be destroyed again, that you may live in for all eternity.
He has a clean life, free from all sin, to offer. He
bears the stripes, the wounds, the lies, the mockery, and yet replies, “All
this I gladly suffer”. And He is lifted up, that He draw all men to Himself and
He is made into a corpse, dying and being buried. The ultimate Abomination: the
death of God, is the Abomination of desolation.
So you missed the sign some 2000 years ago. You missed
the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place that was your signal
to flee from the world, its false Christ’s, and its Beast System. You are
looking into the heavens, as the Apostles did on Ascension day. You are looking
up for answers and signs, but Christ goes ahead of you to Galilee of the
gentiles, down on earth.
For though the Abomination of Desolation has passed in
history, its spirit lives on inside you. What are abominable to God are a
delight to the eyes of sinners, good for food, and seemingly desirable to make
one wise, like God, knowing good from evil (Gen 3).
Jesus knocks the temple of abomination down to the
ground with the “greatest” abomination: His suffering and death. However, this
abomination that the Lord creates instead cleanses perfectly and knocks down
the high places in your heart. Remember, the real abomination is that of your
sinful nature, the world, and the devil’s reaction to God.
Thus what the Lord creates in His crucifixion is an
anti-abomination, in that it dispels and destroys that which creates
abomination: sin, death, and the power of the devil. This is what the Lord
meant when He said that our abominations are in our teeth, in Zechariah 9:7.
They are our original, corrupted selves in need of salvation.
For even though the death of God truly is the abomination of
desolation, from that desolation of God on your behalf, comes life eternal. God
does not stay dead. Instead He forces death to create life. He forces
abomination to produce holiness.
You see, even though the Temple, God’s Church, was full of
abominations, He did not forsake her. As He promised, she would be a house
where He and His Name would dwell forever (Deut 12:11; 1 Ki. 9:3). And it would
be such a place come hell or high water. And both did come. Jesus made His bed
in the lower places of the earth (Ps 139:8) and before that had cried out in
the Psalms how the waters of His enemies came above His head, on the cross (Ps
69:2).
So now God’s Name is on the cross as well, “This is Jesus
of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. Now God’s Name is beneath the earth, having
been buried and descended into hell. Now God’s Name is upon the Resurrection,
as He is the First-born of the dead. He surrounds His enemies and their
abominations on all sides, ensuring His victory.
And grace upon Grace, He takes His Name and places it upon
the cause and source of all abominations: your forehead and your heart. He
baptizes you, a poor miserable sinner, into His holy, resurrected Body that you
be cleansed fully, unlike the Temple, and share in God’s own holiness for all
eternity.
And to continue to make His holiness known upon earth and to
continue to lead you away from any and all abominations, He sets up His
anti-abomination shop in plain sight, in all places, and in all times. The Good
Shepherd sets up and call His shepherds to shepherd His people. Through them,
He calls believers to break bread with Him, in Word and Sacrament, and commands
that they eat and drink His Supper to proclaim His death until He comes.
In this way, Church and liturgy encapsulate and live in all
that the world considers an abomination, which is a good thing. Because what
God calls good, the world calls evil. Thus, our key to surviving this time of
the “abomination of desolation” is Christ Crucified and the bunker, the safe
house, the fallout shelter is His Word and Sacrament given and shed for you,
handed out in His Divine Service.
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